I wouldn't spend to much time worrying about why the other party is doing what they are doing.

Contractors spend hours putting together Bid Proposals and it's not fair to them if you waste their time by 'shopping' and price matching with other Contractors.If you 'bid shop' Contractor's numbers you are going to get a bad reputation, and you will have a hard time finding Contractors to bid your projects.Sure, you may save a few dollars upfront, but ultimately you are going to p*ss off a lot of contractors and potentially hurt your business long-term.

This provider, in addition to 3x rent as qualifying income, they also look at the budget, credit, and spending patterns of the prospect tenant and see their DTI ratio as a contributing factor.

What if you want to downsize and no longer want to deal with additional employees because you want to spend more time with the family?

You can spend a ton of time learning to deal with it or hand it off to petscreening.com and let them do all the work for free.

Every hour I am spending doing "non-billable labor" repairs from tenant damage is an hour of income lost in my work week, since I cannot be in two places at once and I only have a certain number of billable hours of toil every week.That being said, I have never been challenged on this via a court case, but when that day comes my justifications for charging for my own labor will be, (a) the repair work I do is part of my income, and (b) the tenant signed a document disclosing what the charges would be, and it should matter not to the tenant who actually did the repairs.  

So if somebody touts himself all over podcasts and the internet as an experienced operator across several large MF properties despite only having raised capital for those deals, doesn't he seem like an experienced operator to anybody spending 30+ seconds to research that person?

If you want to spend that time chasing deals to make you possibly $20,000 an hour - that is where the gold is.  

I prefer the ones that need a little bit of work as you can often get a better deal, but if you're going to get a loan - usually 25% down, you can actually end up spending more actual cash this way.  25% down, plus some rehab instead of 25% down with no rehab, but a higher PP. 

Spend it, Jim, spend it!